“Name A’gentur. Profession, supplementary surgeon. Status, animal. I’m not an underperson. Just an animal. I came in on the ship from Mars with the dead man there and some other true men who looked like him, and they went down first—”

“Shut up,” said the uniformed man. He turned to the approaching men and said, “Honored subchief, Sergeant 387 reporting. The user of the telepathic weapon has disappeared. The only things here are these two cat people, not very bright, and a small monkey. They can talk. The girl says she saw somebody get off the tower.”

The subchief was a tall redhead with a uniform even handsomer than the sergeant’s. He snapped at C’mell, “How did he do it?”

Rod knew C’mell well enough by now to recognize the artfulness of her becoming confused, feminine and incoherent — in appearance. Actually, she was in full control of the situation. Said she, babbling:

“He jumped, I think. I don’t know how.”

“That’s impossible,” said the subchief. “Did you see where he went?” he barked at Rod McBan.

Rod gasped at the suddenness of the question: besides, C’mell had told him to keep quiet. Between these two peremptories, he said, “Er — ah — oh — you see—”

The little monkey-surgeon interrupted drily, “Sir and Master Subchief, that cat-man is not very bright. I do not think you will get much out of him. Handsome but stupid. Strictly breeding stock—”

Rod gagged and turned a little red at these remarks, but he could tell from the hooded quick glare which C’mell shot him that she wanted him to go on being quiet.

She cut in. “I did notice one thing, Master. It might matter.”

“By the Bell and Bank, animal! Tell me,” cried the subchief. “Stop deciding what I ought to know!”

“The strange man’s skin was lightly tinged with blue.”

The subchief took a step back. His soldiers and the sergeant stared at him. In a serious, direct way he said to C’mell, “Are you sure?”

“No, my Master. I just thought so.”

“You saw just one?” barked the subchief.

Rod, overacting the stupidity, held up four fingers.

“That idiot,” cried the subchief, “thinks he saw four of them. Can he count?” he asked C’mell.

C’mell looked at Rod as though he were a handsome beast with not a brain in his head. Rod looked back at her, deliberately letting himself feel stupid. This was something which he did very well, since by neither hiering nor spieking at home, he had had to sit through interminable hours of other people’s conversation when he was little, never getting the faintest idea of what it was all about. He had discovered very early that if he sat still and looked stupid, people did not bother him by trying to bring him into the conversation, turning their voices on and braying at him as though he were deaf. He tried to simulate the familiar old posture and was rather pleased that he could make such a good showing with C’mell watching him. Even when she was seriously fighting for their freedom and playing girl all at once, her corona of blazing hair made her shine forth like the sun of Earth itself; among all these people on the platform, her beauty and her intelligence made her stand out, cat though she was. Rod was not at all surprised that he was overlooked, with such a vivid personality next to him; he just wished that he could be overlooked a little more, so that he could wander over idly and see whether the body was Eleanor’s or one of the robots’. If Eleanor had already died for him, in her first few minutes of the big treat of seeing Earth, he felt that he would never forgive himself as long as he lived.

The talk about the blue men amused him deeply. They existed in Norstrilian folklore, as a race of faraway magicians who, through science or hypnotism, could render themselves invisible to other men whenever they wished. Rod had never talked with an Old North Australian security officer about the problem of guarding the stroon treasure from attacks by invisible men, but he gathered, from the way people told stories of blue men, that they had either failed to show up in Norstrilia or that the Norstrilian authorities did not take them very seriously. He was amazed that the Earth people did not bring in a couple of first-class telepaths and have them sweep the deck of the tower for every living thing, but to judge by the chatter of voices that was going on, and the peering with eyes which occurred, Earth people had fairly weak senses and did not get things done promptly and efficiently.

The question about Eleanor was answered for him.

One of the soldiers joined the group, waited after saluting, and was finally allowed to interrupt C’mell’s and A’gentur’s endless guessing as to how many blue men there might have been on the tower, if there had been any at all.

The subchief nodded at the soldier, who said,

“Beg to report, Sir and Subchief, the body is not a body. It is just a robot which looks like a person.”

The day brightened immeasurably within Rod’s heart. Eleanor was safe, somewhere further down in this immense tower.

The comment seemed to decide the young officer. “Get a sweeping machine and a looking dog,” he commanded the sergeant, “and see to it that this whole area is swept and looked down to the last square millimeter.”

“It is done,” said the soldier.

Rod thought this an odd remark, because nothing at all had been done yet.

The subchief issued another command: “Turn on the kill-spotters before we go down the ramp. Any identity which is not perfectly clear must be killed automatically by the scanning device. Including us,” he added to his men. “We don’t want any blue men walking right down into the tower among us.”

C’mell suddenly and rather boldly stepped up to the officer and whispered in his ear. His eyes rolled as he listened, he blushed a little, and then changed his orders: “Cancel the kill-spotters. I want this whole squad to stand body-to-body. I’m sorry, men, but you’re going to have to touch these underpeople for several minutes. I want them to stand so close to us that we can be sure there is nobody extra sneaking into our group.”

(C’mell later told Rod that she had confessed to the young officer that she might be a mixed type, part human and part animal, and that she was the special girlygirl of two off-Earth magnates of the Instrumentality. She said she thought that she had a definite identity but was not sure, and that the kill-spotters might destroy her if she did not yield a correct image as she went past them. They would, she told Rod later, have caught any underman passing as a man, or any man passing as an underman, and would have killed the victim by intensifying the magnetic layout of his own organic body. These machines were dangerous things to pass, since they occasionally killed normal, legitimate people and underpeople who merely failed to provide a clear focus.)

The officer took the left forward corner of the living rectangle of people and underpeople. They formed tight ranks. Rod felt the two soldiers next to him shudder as they came into contact with his “cat” body. They kept their faces averted from him as though he smelled bad for them. Rod said nothing; he just looked forward and kept his expression pleasantly stupid.

What followed next was surprising. The men walked in a strange way, all of them moving their left legs in unison, and then their right legs. A’gentur could not possibly do this, so with a nod of the sergeant’s approval, C’mell picked him up and carried him close to her bosom. Suddenly, weapons flared.

These, thought Rod, must be cousins of the weapons which the Lord Redlady carried a few weeks ago, when he landed his ship on my property. (He remembered Hopper, his knife quivering like the head of a snake, threatening the life of the Lord Redlady; and he remembered the sudden silent burst, the black oily smoke, and the gloomy Bill looking at the chair where his pal had existed a moment before.)